W.H. seeks to extend budget stopgap

Showing the first signs of coming off the sideline, the White House made a late bid Monday to extend the life of a stopgap government funding bill to a full month and thereby allow more time for the administration to become engaged in the House-Senate talks.

The House is slated to vote Tuesday on a two week extension of the current continuing resolution due to expire this Friday, Mar. 4. The administration would instead like that to run a full 30 days, and this triggered a meeting Monday evening between Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in the senator’s offices.

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Neither man shed much light on the talks.

“I’m not going to discuss that tonight,” Reid told POLITICO. Boehner would say only that he was sticking with the two-week time frame of the bill filed last Friday by the House Appropriations Committee.

That measure would extend funding for the government through March 18 and includes about $4 billion in spending cuts as a downpayment of sorts for the larger deal on appropriations the speaker hopes to get for the 2011 fiscal year ending Sept. 30.

“No,” Boehner said when asked if would alter his bill. “Yes,” he said as to whether he would stay with just two weeks.

The House measure is expected to pass quickly after limited debate Tuesday. But this still leaves the intriguing possibility that the administration and Senate Democrats could seek to “double the pot” of spending cuts to $8 billion and amend the bill to run 30 days.

House Republicans have been needling Reid for weeks, saying he is a “status quo” leader on curbing spending. This would give the Nevada Democrat a chance to take back the initiative and address one of his own peeves: that House Republicans are nibbling away at the budget without setting a real bottom lime and serious chunk of time for crafting an agreement.

The background to the maneuvering now is House passage Feb. 19 of a Republican-backed package of spending cuts, now scored by the Congressional Budget Office – after additional cuts on the floor — as a $61.3 billion reduction from non-emergency appropriations for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. This is about twice what Boehner had once envisioned, but for all the bloodshed, the immediate impact on the deficit is quite small given that many of the cuts come from relatively slow spending accounts.

According to the same CBO data released over the weekend, for example, direct outlays for the same appropriations accounts would only fall by about $9 billion in fiscal 2011, when the deficit is projected at better than $1.5 trillion.

President Barack Obama has argued that a five-year domestic spending freeze is the better course, and such a bill has been drafted by the Senate Appropriations Committee Democrats. But getting it across the Senate floor will take more than two weeks. And one reason that Republicans now want the shorter two-week CR extension is it gives Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) more leverage to insist upon some version of the House cuts instead,.

The White House’s 30-day request, however late, makes tactical sense for Democrats then, and perhaps more important, it is the first evidence that Obama realizes he must get more involved. The House Republican cuts would be crippling for much of the president’s agenda at home and abroad, but as recently as this past weekend, he was taking an above-it-all stance that frustrated his allies in Congress.

At this stage, the odds still are that the House’s two-week time frame will prevail. But getting Obama more directly involved is important for Democrats and the request then for 30 days can’t be quickly dismissed when they caucus Tuesday.